VCA BUG?

I’m trying to figure out just how much I care about this at the moment. I’m just demoing v10 so it makes sense to test stuff, but on the other hand I feel I need more work specifically on Nuendo for me to care more…

Anyway, if I have time this week I’ll find repro steps and an explanation of what I think is proper expected behavior and then see if people can repro. I think it really makes sense at this point to come up with all scenarios of working and then compiling them into a list of steps to test on new versions, you know… just rip through a long list and check off stuff that I/we care about.

I’ll respectfully disagree about trying to fix a fundamentally flawed VCA concept. Clearly there are just too many underlying issues with VCAs and automation so it needs a rewrite on stable code rather than band-aid patching the current disaster.

Twelve,

You and I actually have no idea what the problems really are. I’m not convinced it’s conceptually flawed at a fundamental level, at least not the way I understand those words.

I honestly don’t really care how they solve the things I see here and for other types of automation as long as they’re solved. I also don’t think they’ll go back and redo this particular code. They might of course but I don’t think they want to if a fix is a reasonable alternative from their perspective.

Let’s put it another way. If it was an easy fix it would have been done and fixing one thing wouldn’t break another. Right now it’s a band-aid bunch of fixes on a fundamentally flawed concept and you know as well as I do that VCAs have also never worked properly since their introduction. Whoever designed the VCA spec I guess doesn’t quite understand how they should work or it wasn’t communicated to the programmers correctly. How the automation works/was designed also did not take into account having VCAs and trying to add those on top of what is there breaks many things.

Cubase 10.5 is here, don’t have time to test -perhaps they did some work on VCAs? perhaps not, haven’t seen any mention, but they usually don’t include bug fixes as part of their release highlights.

No change with VCAs in 10.5.

I just tried this in v10 and I cannot reproduce this.

I just tried in 10.2 and I can reproduce it easily.

Don’t know what to say. I followed the steps exactly as written and the project opens with the first track still at negative infinity.

I think you’re misreading what’s required.

  • Create a new project
  • Create an audio track
  • Set audio track to -10dB FS
  • Create a VCA which is connected to that audio track (VCA @ 0, audio track still @ -10)
  • Draw some automation on the VCA channel which goes from 0 to -oo (e.g. a few bars into the project)
  • Position the cursor on the VCA automation which is @ -oo and save the project
  • Close the project
  • Re-open the project
  • Position the cursor at the front of the project

→ Expected: Audio track would be @ -10dB FS at the front of the session with the VCA @ 0
→ Action: Audio track is now @ 0dB FS with the VCA @ 0

Super easy to reproduce here.

Yeah, don’t know what to tell you, really. It’s exactly what I did. I even re-did the test before when you said you could reproduce it. I just can’t. When I re-open the project with the cursor parked at -infinity the audio track is at -infinity as well, and when I move the playback head to the top of the timeline the VCA reads unity and the audio track -10dB. I’ll check a third time, but if that doesn’t produce the error I can’t really see that there’s a general problem.

It just seems to work on my end. No idea what the difference is between our setups.

I have the latest demo version of Nuendo 10, and I’m running Windows 10, build 17763.

Third time’s the charm!

Now I get the error. I must have done something differently the other two times or have my tired eyes poorly wired to my dumb brain.

So, yes, confirmed here as well.

cough

confirmed too.

Surely they’ve seen this thread and are aware of this and are just face palming themselves so hard they can’t reply.

I bet you it’s not a simple thing to fix, to not break compatibility with peoples previous projects… Like, it’'s the kind of thing you want to get right on first release…

Has there been any official word on this? I’d love to use VCAs, but I can’t unless I automate audio tracks I don’t wish to automate.

The version history for Nuendo 8 updates has the following bug fix.

CAN-11102 “Audio channels with no automation but connected to a VCA are now restored correctly when loading a project.”

Does this mean that this issue is just something that popped up again for some reason in Nuendo 10? I hope so, if that means it can be fixed again.

I think Nuendo 10.3 is amazing BTW.

not a peep

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